Director Jeff Nichols attends the premiere of The Bikeriders in Berlin on June 6.Matthias Nareyek/Getty Images
Filmmaker Jeff Nichols has spent his career digging into the dirt of the American South to deliver intimate-yet-epic tales of outsiders making their own ways into the world, with those odd men out often played by Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special).
Yet with his new film The Bikeriders, Nichols heads a bit further north, to Chicago, to explore the 1960s rise of the Vandals motorcycle club, a group of outsiders closely modelled on the real-life Outlaws club, whose founding was chronicled in photojournalist Danny Lyon’s landmark photo-book of the same name. (Don’t worry, Shannon is still along for the ride, playing a wild member of the Vandals alongside stars Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer.)
Ahead of The Bikeriders’ release next weekend, Nichols spoke with The Globe about the rules of the road.
Early in the movie, Tom Hardy’s character Johnny is watching Marlon Brando in The Wild One, which inspires him to create the Vandals. Was Lyons’s book your Wild One in terms of making this film?
It’s all Danny’s book for me. I didn’t grow up on motorcycle culture, and if I’m being completely honest, I’m not really interested in contemporary biker culture. I was interested in the people in Danny’s book – his photographs and interviews are romantic and beautiful and unvarnished. You get to hear these working-class people from a particular place and time lay out why they don’t feel they belong in the mainstream. The book was my bible.
How much of the interviews from the book have been pulled into your script?
I’d say 70 per cent of the dialogue in the film is taken directly from those interviews. It was my job to fold them around the plot that I created, so you’re taking bits and pieces from characters who don’t exist in the film. Writing the script was like if someone delivered you just the lines of a movie but without any of the plot, and now you had to come up with something.
When the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival this past fall, you mentioned that you hadn’t yet been able to find the real people played by Jodie and Austin. Has there been any movement since?
There has, and it’s still in a to-be-continued stage. But when we screened the film at the Chicago Film Festival after Telluride, a man came to the box office with a letter saying that he was the son of Jodie’s character. We didn’t really know what to do with it, so we gave the letter to Danny Lyon, and he tracked the guy down to set up an interview with him. That’s in the process of happening right now. We always knew that some people would come out of the woodwork.
The film, which stars Austin Butler, explores the rise of the Vandals motorcycle club, a group of outsiders closely modelled on the real-life Outlaws club.Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features/Focus Features
Have members of the real-life Outlaws club made any approaches, too? You’ve previously said that you wouldn’t like to meet up with those guys in the real world …
One hundred per cent that’s true. But there’s been no contact yet. You hear rumblings of this and that, and they’re certainly aware of the film, and I hope that they like it. But that’s also why I fictionalized it as much as I did. I wanted to give it distance from them, and I didn’t want the responsibility of telling their story accurately. I just wanted to represent the feeling that I got from reading Danny’s book, the relationships between these people and how they viewed the world at the time.
During Telluride, you spoke about the film’s Goodfellas connection, which is present in ways both obvious – the outlaw culture, Jodie’s character acting as a narrator much like Lorraine Bracco in Scorsese’s film, the freeze-frames – and not.
Every day Goodfellas was on my mind. I had two DVDs in my junior year of college, one of which was Fletch and the other was Goodfellas. Depending on my mood, I would put in one every single day. What I consider Goodfellas to really be is a portrait of a very violent subculture, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. You hear these stories of Scorsese tying the neckties of his actors so it’d look exactly right from his memories of growing up around these neighbourhoods. That’s the detail I wanted to represent.
The Bikeriders was originally scheduled to come out in December, in the thick of awards season. But then distribution changed. How did you deal with having to sit on the film until now?
I kind of had to Zen out. I remember talking very frequently to my publicist about it, and I had to do some self-control and stop thinking about it for a while. I live in Austin, not L.A., so there’s a distance. My wife doesn’t care about movies. “Nobody cares about this, Jeff, it will come out when it comes out,” she’d say, but I’d respond, “But read this Deadline article!” The truth is nobody cares about these things except for people in L.A. The rest of the world was just waiting, which was what I did. And now I’m excited.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
The Bikeriders opens in theatres June 21.